I’ve been hard at work the past couple days putting together a proposal for a freelance web development project. It requires the use of a content management system (CMS) so that their organization can control content in an easy way.
So I fiddled around with various things. First off, if you’re in this market, I recommend stopping at OpenSourceCMS. It’s a great site which features sandbox (test) installs of a huge variety of free open source CMS packages. You can login under a sample account and play around. The benefit of this is that you can “try before you buy” (although you don’t actually have to “buy” any of these packages). It saves you time from downloading and installing to your own server - which can be quite a pain in the ass, mainly because you go through all that only to discover the CMS doesn’t really suit your needs.
I ended up doing test installs of two different systems on a directory of my site. First off I tried Drupal. Since I was a kid, I’ve had an aversion to software packages that you have to spend a lot of time reading the manual to figure out how the hell they work. Drupal suffers from this problem very severely. I gave it the test of just diving in and seeing if I could figure out how to make it work like I wanted it to without reading anything.
It failed. Miserably.
So I uninstalled it in a fit of computerized passion. Tip: next time, just leave it be, and set up a new test directory in case you want to come back to it. Anyway, after that, I installed Joomla - which used to be called Mambo. (Yeah, I find all these goofy titles to be annoying also). Drupal and Joomla seem to be in the top 3 (or at least 5) of CMS packages available today.
After playing with both of them though, I have a hard time seeing why.
In some ways, Joomla makes a lot more sense when you first pick it up. After a fairly short while, I understood the basic concept of how it all works, and even put together a sample site using the structural skeleton I needed. Maybe it was just late at night or something though because when I came back to it in the morning, I was like, “Wait a second, this program sucks!” I couldn’t get it to do some really simple things. And overall, the way you have to connect different pieces together to make things happen is just so freaking arcane.
In fact, both these systems - in my opinion - are piss poor if you’re a web developer and you want to roll out a nice simple clean system for a client with no technical expertise to administer their own content. Seriously, I’m pretty good with this stuff, and I was sitting here poring over these texts, trying to understand all their damned jargon, and I just decided to tell both these programs to fuck off. Each has some cool features and maybe would work for some other application, but for what I need, they both are a waste of time.
So what am I going to do instead?
WordPress! I can’t express how much I love WordPress. It gives you so many great options. It’s simple, it’s flexible and extensible, and it actually makes goddamned sense when you’re using it. If you click on a button, it does what you expect - not some weird convoluted cockamamy crap. Anyway, what I’m going to do is do a custom install of WordPress so that it mimics all the CMS functionality that I would need.
But anyway, I realize we’re sort of veering off course from the topic of “Pop Occulture” with all this - which is precisely why I’ll be starting that tech blog on my site in the next couple days. Then use tech-heads can get our rocks off discussing that stuff without getting in anybody else’s way. I’ll post a link to that when it’s all ready to go.
PS. Does anybody have a good tip for a free FTP program that runs on PC’s? I’ve been using this one for years that just no longer cuts it anymore. It’s CuteFTP (but it’s an older version I guess). Anyway, I want something free and with nice smooth features.
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19 Comments
Hmmm…. I am actively looking at joomla… how are you going to do a custom install of WP to make it mimic a CMS?
oh btw CoffeeCup Free FTP is decent
or you could go to tucows.com and see whats the highest rated
Basically, I’m just going to turn off the posts appearing on the front page. And then hard-code an intro text there, or do some kind of simple php include. I think there’s a plugin to do that. I’ll send you a link when I’m done with it.
Just look up “wordpress as a CMS” on google for more people who did this.
How are you liking joomla? It pissed me off.
try filezilla… i just downloaded it today and its nice… very similar to WSFTP but free and legal.
did you try aeNovo for a CMS?
aeNovo runs on ASP. I’d rather work in PHP
filezilla! i never use anything else.
Hehe. Now I’m thinking about going back to Drupal over my earlier objections. I’m really being quite indecisive about all this. I guess first I need to check out how hard it will be to do modifications to the CSS and themes in Drupal. Part of what draws me back to WordPress is how easy it all is to change that stuff in it.
You know I realize part of what I hate so much about Drupal is the fucking nasty themes and interface that you get when you first start out. I loaded up the Blix theme (after several rounds of failure) and now it’s not so horrible…
No, nevermind! I still can’t figure out this fucking taxonomy/node shit in Drupal. I swear, for how smart they’re supposed to be, sometimes programmers can be the dumbest people.
Hey Tim,
The taxonomy/node thing is just to confuse the ungeeks. Substitute the words category (and sub-categories)/article and you’re halfway there.
So on TDG, I have two top level categories, News and Features. Below those I have sub-categories (see the front page, under the title, for the different ones (eg. News Briefs, Writing Wroundup etc).
Nodes are just articles…of all descriptions. That includes your taxonomy system of articles, as well as polls and blogs.
The trick is just to set your taxonomy (categories) up correctly to begin with. Drupal can be a pretty powerful system, although as I’ve said to you in email it does have drawbacks. For a CMS, one of my favourite features is the permissions, which give real power in who gets to see and do what on the site (I think there’s now even a module that allows roles to be granted to people who pay some money via Paypal).
Peace and Respect,
Greg
Well I guess I’m a Drupal bigot. As Greg says, “taxonomy” is mostly a poor choice of words. In the belly of Drupal, there are nodes and catagories. Plugins use these in different ways to manage content. Drupal has a good aggregator, which could be used to bridge with other types of sites that you might set up.
One problem, that most popular CMSs probably have, is that it’s well known by spammers. But, Drupal has a very effectice spam filter plugin. I get thousands of spam attempts per month and in six months only a dozen or so have gotten through. Of course, we’ve come to expect as much these days.
There’s also a Flexinode plugin that allows non-programmers to create their own node types by adding some fields. This might be a good selling point. Then again, you might not want customers creating various sundry noe types that do the same thing anyway.
bill
Guh! I’ve had it with CMS stuff. It’s all I’ve been thinking about the past few days. It’s driving me crazy!
The thing I’m struggling with in Drupal at the moment is how to show a listing of multiple entries in a category. Say I have a category called “news” with two subcategories, “calendar” and “press releases”. Is there a way I can create a page (node?) which shows everything in those sub-categories as a title list? I’m guessing it has something to do with that damned articles module?
The shit part is I may not even land this contract anyway, as there are much bigger design firms applying. But I feel like I should learn anyway just to know it, and maybe incorporate it into my site.
You know what! Drupal won’t even let me login now. I stupidly got rid of the login box from my layout, thinking it had a separate login page you could reach automatically like Wordpress, and now I can’t even get into the damn thing because my cookie or session or something expired. Fuck that damn program!
patience young jedi!
My WordPress CMS is moving forward nicely. Now that I’m in the proper mindspace, I find it about a million times easier just to add in the conditional PHP logic to the WordPress template. The logic is really simple if elseif statements so far… More on this as I do it.
WordPress is extensible enough to make a nice CMS in many situations. I used Joomia back when it was still Mambo. I’ve had good experiences with PHPNuke and PostNuke as well. FileZilla is the way to go as far as graphical FTP clients.
Yeah, I have to say that in general, I’m REALLY pleased by the adaptability of WordPress here, and the user community support is totally top notch. Other people have had the same problems as me before and everybody’s got different solutions. After I finish this, I’m going to put together a tutorial on how I did it, complete with code snippets and everything.
I went back and forth from Drupal to Zope/Plone to PHPWebsite to Mambo (pre-Joomla) for a while, but then finally just went to WP 1.5 and got my department’s site the way I wanted it. It’s not difficult to tweak the templates, and there are so many user-contributed plugins and tips (esp. in the forums and on people’s blogs) that it’s next to impossible to come up with a problem that someone else hasn’t already solved.
I don’t have a problem adapting to different taxonomies, but I’ve found that the terms WP uses (posts, pages, categories… and I found a nice tagging plugin that I’m using, after renaming “tags” “keywords” for my users, who aren’t exactly part of the del.icio.us demographic) are familiar to the people who have to actually use the system to enter content. There are also several WYSIWYG plugins for the editing environment, including three that use TinyMCE (a nice cross-browser, XHTML-compliant WYWIWYG tool).
I didn’t need a full-blown CMS; just a way to go on vacation from time to time without coming back to an inbox full of web page edits to be made because nobody else could edit the site.
WP let me do that in a short amount of time.
Let me also add my vote for FileZilla. It’s a great tool.
Thanks MJ, those are pretty much exactly the same conclusions and reasoning I’ve come to at this point. WP is much better for regular users, and the customization of it is an absolute snap - especially, like you said, because of the excellent forum support.